Motorsport Manager On The Grid November 10th

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Sega are expanding their portfolio of sports management games again this year, slipping the non-footballing cars of Motorsport Manager [official site] in alongside their iced hockey sim, carless football sim, and copy of The Beano they covertly read during conference calls. Our Adam has enjoyed what his time managing an (off-brand) Formula 1 racing team in previews, and soon we’ll be allowed a crack. November 10th is when Motorsport Manager will launch, Sega announced today.

Motorsport Manager has players build a racing team with drivers and coaches and whatnot, develop and tune cars, plan race strategies, and try to deal with surprises. Y’know, you manage a motorsport team.

Here’s a chunk of what Adam thought after being a carlord:

“The thing that makes me aware that MM is going to eat up lots of my free time is the evolving nature of the world. It’s not as in-depth or broad as FM, but teams and individual drivers create their own dynamic stories, and the changes in track sequence for each season, as well as alterations to rules, create a good sense of existing within an evolving sport rather than a static set of challenges. My lack of knowledge about the sport means it probably won’t overtake Out of the Park or FM, but the fact that I don’t need to understand exactly why the precise angle of a wing (CARS HAVE WINGS!?) lets me enjoy the roleplay aspect of managing the team.”

Sega have also announced the minimum system requirements. You’ll need 6GB of RAM, a 3.20GHz Intel Core i5-3470 or 3.5Ghz AMD FX-6300, a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX or 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7870 (sorry, integrated graphics), 15GB of space, decent Internet, and a 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Motorsport Manager will hit Windows and Mac on November 10th then come to Linux “shortly afterwards”. I’m a little surprised they’re releasing it so soon after Football Manager 2017 – out November 4th – but perhaps I’m overestimating how much the two games’ playerbases would overlap.

Yes. Considering this is a management & engineering sim and not a racing game or city-builder it’s odd to see these requirements. It makes me suspicious of just how optimized the game will be, if it will unnecessarily tank your system.

On the other hand, since the game is not actually finished yet, maybe they simply want to be cautious so that people don’t pre-order the thing and get surprised if the game won’t run well on their system.

I think that’s the smart way around the Steam’s idiotic system where every fool gets to complain over his/her own pisspoor configuration, punishing the overall game’s score in the process.

People might argue that this has nothing to do with the game’s overall health, however due to color-coded prominence of this highly volatile information this value might still slightly skew things psychologically, especially whenever someone’s making that final decision whether to buy the game or not.

I might as well add that this tends to contribute to a certain snowball effect (as it’s easy to fall into ‘orange’ zone, but difficult to get out of it, as people tend to stick with the negative emotions and comments finding them more trustworthy than genuinely positive reviews), which is very unfortunate for the indie gaming business in the long term.

It should be called ‘Formula Manager’ in my opinion, since it only has a single class of vehicle; a Formula One inspired class. ‘Motorsport’ to me should only be used to indicate multiple classes of cars, not just one.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely interested is this game, … even though previous games with the same concept have failed to live up to my expectations.

It doesn’t necessarily have to go to motorbikes/rally/tin-top etc, but putting in something based on GT/Prototype racing would add so much more depth to the game. Climbing the ranks of entirely different types of racing (in the same championship) would be brilliant.

But when I think about some of the detail they have gone in with being able to tweak car setups etc, I can understand why they haven’t included a wide range of motorsports at launch.